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I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Time
Number
Life
Numbers
Story
Tell
Stories
Able
Ever
Might
Suppose

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Donna Tartt
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
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Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
Donna Tartt
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I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
Donna Tartt
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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Donna Tartt
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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
Donna Tartt
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The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Donna Tartt
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
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It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
Donna Tartt
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Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
Donna Tartt
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
Donna Tartt
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It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
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But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Donna Tartt
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Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Donna Tartt
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Donna Tartt
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A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
Donna Tartt
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Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time
Donna Tartt
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You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
Donna Tartt
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt